Le Projet Gutenberg (1971-2005)

The essay recounts the origins and evolution of an early volunteer-driven digital library from its 1970s founding to international expansion by the early 2000s. It explains practical choices such as plain-text formatting and coordinated volunteer proofreading, and describes organizational tools and mirror sites that supported steady collection growth. The author examines legal questions about the public domain and the methods used to select, encode, and disseminate texts. A chronology and links document milestones, while concluding remarks survey prospects for multilingual collections, multimedia digitization, and the enduring goal of low-cost, widely accessible reading.